[ethan_g]

No, this is not the approach at any of the large banks.

It's not the fine that kills you. It's when your customers lose your trust and no one trades with you any more. Goldman has a ton of competitors in all their businesses that would pounce on any angle they could use to lure away customers. Committing fraud, etc, is a quick way to lose all your customers.

Plus the SEC and other regulators have a lot of political pressure to nail the big banks for any misbehavior.

Big banks are paranoid about these things and have huge compliance departments to minimize the chance of anything going wrong with a regulator.